The niche and paratextual industries of games and play

Individual & Group Contributions

We all know how painful group presentations can be at university – and how quickly it can go downhill as the weeks fly by.

But I have to say, for this class, I have had three of the most awesome girls as group members. Having a group of people who work well together, are comfortable to express their ideas and help each other throughout is quite wonderful.

So to get to the point, our final idea for our group game was ‘The Balancing Act‘, and we all contributed as much as we could to get the game ready to present. I have to agree with Claire and her blog post, where she explains that we all felt like our game was too simple and it was difficult to split the workload around in a way that made us feel like we were all contributing as much as we could.

Originally our game concept was too simple especially when thinking about the feedback loop and we found that there wasn’t a real purpose for the game. So a lot of the communication and brainstorms about this problem was through our Facebook page which was a great way to communicate and share our ideas and thoughts. In the end, we all ended up picking an idea that was suggested by Claire and we all built on it and modified it in a way to communicate the concept of struggling and balancing with life and university.

My contribution to this group project was helping with game-specific research that we used in the final presentation as well as brainstorming game names, helping with some of the presentation slides (which can be found here) and finally pitching the game to the class with Zoe. Again, it was difficult in a way to work around the feeling if not being able to contribute much because of the limited amount of workload to share around. The other girls also did some great work which is added below.

Overall we worked well together on this project and I think it showed with our final product.